For all its handles – the Ferry Series, the Battle of the Boroughs – perhaps the Brooklyn Cyclone-Staten Island Yankee series simply should be called what it is: The best baseball rivalry in New York right now.
Crazy, but true. With the big-league Mets mired in next-to-last place in the NL East, and the Yankees streaking toward another division title, the major league showdown hasn’t had the same fire.
Meanwhile, the Class A-ball rivalry has turned into a showdown of the top two teams in the New York-Penn League and has all the makings of a TV miniseries. Indeed, the teams are calling the two-game series “must-win games.”
“It’s two teams playing games that we need to take,” Baby Bomber DH Shelley Duncan said.
Entering last night’s action at Richmond County Bank Ballpark at St. George, the Cyclones (24-10) owned first place in the McNamara Division, two games ahead of the second-place Yankees (21-11). With the 76-game regular season nearly half over, the teams are on a collision course to meet in the playoffs.
In fact, if the season ended today, Brooklyn and Staten Island would play a best-of-three series in which the Cyclones would have home-field advantage at KeySpan Park.
Cyclone reliever David Byard said that the roughly 8,000 fans the Cyclones draw each night in Brooklyn is a factor behind their success. Staten Island, on the other hand, sometimes doesn’t even draw crowds half that size.
Last night’s game, however, was a sellout, packed, as Duncan put it, “with fans in our own ballpark who are rooting against us.”
There’s no denying there’s a little juice to the rivalry. After Brooklyn swept the two-game series July 14-15, Staten Island pitching coach Neil Allen told The Post that the next time the teams played, it would be different.
“I’ve got their timing down,” Allen said of the Brooklyn pitchers. “Next time we play, [Cyclone pitching coach] Bobby Ojeda won’t know what the [bleep] hit him.”